A Tribute to Victor Hugo, 1802-1885

Harry Guest is the translator of Victor Hugo's selected poems, The Distance, the Shadows (Anvil) £6.95 pb.

Novels and plays pass more readily through the language-barrier than poetry. We feel, despite inadequate translations, that we know Chekhov and Ibsen because dramas present situations and relationships between three-dimensional figures on a stage. We also treasure the memory of certain performances - Ashcroft in Rosmersholm, Olivier as Astrov - which help to fix the experience as part of our own heritage. Events occur in the novels of Turgenev or Kafka that we can witness or share, although we miss the special overtones that Russian or German may have for the native speaker. Even epic poetry, because on one level it offers pure narrative, can come into this category. And films, since even the most consciously literary one is an assembly of images, cross all frontiers with ease so that Mizoguchi and Eisenstein and Bergman can be referred to with an entire absence of apologetic explanation.

One's knowledge of poetry in a foreign language is bound to be partial, depending as it does on so many factors - fashion, availability of good translations, chance references. Such poets as Rilke, Po Chü-i, Neruda, Cavafy, Yevtushenko are perhaps better 'known' on these terms than many comparable British or American poets. There is of course no substitute for the response to the text itself. This is why it is vital to encourage the study of literature in the original in ...